


what will survive of us

by masterofesoterica



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Childhood Friends, F/M, Gen, Gender Roles, Genderswap, Male-Female Friendship, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 00:40:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7596550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofesoterica/pseuds/masterofesoterica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A girl from Spinners End meets a boy in Cokeworth. Things change and they stay the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. year zero

Leigh was beautiful with his charming smile that made you feel like you were the only person in the room with him. His forest green eyes would light up when he sees you, and you always blush.

 

You saw him first, that day at the playground with the rusty swing.

 

“Peyton, I got you!” He laughed as he tackled the older blond boy to the ground.

 

“Okay! Okay! Get off me, alright?” But the blond brother was also laughing. It sounded a bit like a wheeze. You found him repulsive.

 

They were running, racing each other to the swings. A thorn dug into your leg but you didn’t notice. His head was thrown back, radiant, the sun making his red hair shine like a halo. Then, he was leaping off the swing, letting go of the chains, and floating in the air before drifting to the ground like an autumn leaf.

 

\--

 

“Stupid girl!” Tobias is drunk; he often is.

 

You slip past your mother on the stairs who looks at you beneath half-lidded eyes. You tread on the steps that do not creak. It is a familiar pattern.

 

Eileen slips out the back door to collect the wild herbs by the waning moon. She is barefoot and dressed in a thick cloak. Sometimes she asks you if you’d like to come. Sometimes you sleep beneath the moon and heather, sometimes in a barn with animals. Tonight she wants her solitude.

 

The Cokeworth villagers always say: there are witches about these woods. Sometimes, there’s a lamb with its throat cut.

 

\--

 

You are eleven with your Hogwarts letter clenched in your hand. Leigh waves his in the air. Peyton watches the two of you sullenly from where he is sitting, perched with his knees drawn up to his chest. He’s always liked you, you think. He’s always looking to you for sympathy, as though you’d understand what it is like to be less than.

 

You are like him, turning to face Leigh for the light he bears, and turning away because it is scorching. But when you go away in September, you will no longer be like thin, pale Peyton at all.

 

When you put your letter down again, in the cold house at Spinners End, the ink is smudged and your hand is dark.

 

\--

 

“A wand,” Ollivander says, “will choose you.”

 

No one has ever chosen you; the boxes with their black seals are silent promises. But you leave with one such box. Even Eileen had smiled when you’d glowed with its warmth.

 

You return to Cokeworth; the town is brighter through the force of your will, and the warmth you have felt. You spend the last days of summer tracing the river to where it flows clear. You brew a million potions with the plants you pass, and you cast a million spells with the sun in your veins. You lie down in the wet grass with the rain on your tongue and the night covering your cold: you dream.


	2. year one

You remember Eileen folding her worn green and silver scarf into her old trunk. She smiled at you then, and straightened the lapels of the coat you wore, an old one which you’d found in a box on the sidewalk one morning in the wealthy part of town.

She used to say, ‘my sweet girl, darling,’ and found clothes with ribbons in the muggle second-hand shops for you.

You think of the scarf when you’re on the train, pushing your arms through thrice-mended robes, and folding your shirt and skirt and coat carefully because you cannot afford not to. Your eyes above the sink peer out beneath black lashes, and there is nothing to be done about your nose. Your hair hangs past your waist in uneven strands, and your smile is unpractised. You are not what a girl should be.

\--

Jamie Potter is beautiful with a wide grin and big hazel eyes. She never looks down and never hesitates to say whatever she likes. Those two things you learn about her immediately.

You also see how Leigh’s eyes widen when she throws her head back, when the pale column of her throat bobs with her laughter. It is Leigh who always looks away.

“Gryffindor, where dwell the brave of heart,” Jamie is saying.

You keep silent as good girls ought to. You think of Eileen’s scarf.

“She’s quiet,” the other girl is saying, pointing to you; you think her name is Sirius.

“She’s just shy,” Leigh is always defending you, like he defended you when the kids at the muggle school called you ‘witch’. You always laughed, because they were right, and it wasn’t a shame.

And it’s not a shame now. You squeeze Leigh’s hand once, and turn towards the window.

\--

Leigh is smiling at you from the Gryffindor table. He is sitting as close to the front as he could, his eyes bright. Behind him, you see a dark head of messy hair.

You are the quiver in your breath and the unsteady seams of your robes. The hat comes over you like a wave.

Oh I see. Intelligence. And inventiveness. Resourcefulness in spades. Tradition. Is it approval you seek? A bundle of contradictions.

You think of the castle and the lake. You imagine yourself a part of its traffic. Your mother’s eyes are grey and not green. They glisten almost silver in the moonlight.

Very well then.

\--

Avery, Mulciber and Lestrange have their heads bowed together whispering. You look away. You pull the curtains closed around you. There was never a bed so soft and warm, it is like lying beneath the stars with your mother again, except you can sleep without the air freezing your lungs. 

You imagine the swirls and eddies in the water outside the window, stirred up by the creatures who dwell in the parts where the sun does not touch. You think how the other girls sneered. “Why,” they said, “your blood is half mud.”

It does feel sluggish in your veins.

Unthinking, the words had come to your lips. You trusted too hard, spoke too soon. Thinking to confide, thinking to belong.

Good girls are seen and not heard—and you, being an ugly thing, would be better off neither seen nor heard.

\--

After a few weeks, Avery apologises to you, her soft lips pressed tight. She holds out a smooth, cool hand which you grasp limply for a few seconds, shy of the state of your palms and fingernails.

Avery loops an arm around your shoulders; and though you try to keep your spine straight, the force of her arm draws you towards the other girl’s shoulder, so that you are awkwardly bent, as if in supplication. Avery makes the other girls shake your hand in turn.

\--

In your classes, you hide your face, and your tricks. It does not do for a girl to be brash. You squirrel away the knowledge that the professors impart like little nuggets of gold to hid in your hoard. You will only give up what you know at heavy cost.

You covet.

Leigh tells you he doesn’t like Jamie; she’s show-offish, and too confident in the gleam of her teeth, and her skill spinning through the air on her broomstick. It is a skill that neither you nor Leigh has managed to master so far.

“You’d never be so forward or so loud,” Leigh reassures you with a pat of your arm. He sounds proud of you.

Jamie makes disparaging remarks about you. “Why doesn’t she say anything?” is her constant refrain. Her three friends are merely bored by you. They hex you a few times in the corridors. Jamie is magnanimous when Professor Flitwick forces them to apologise. She even holds out a hand, which you can’t bring yourself to touch.


	3. year two

“First year over!” Leigh bounces towards his parents on the train platform. Peyton stands to the side a little, scanning the crowds.

 

You’re doing the same, wondering if your mother would be here. You spot her towards the back of the crowds where she is pressed against the wall, and her hair hangs in her face. She smiles a little when she sees you walking slowly towards her, holding out a thin arm, and clutching you close to her as soon as she could reach you.

 

She leans her chin against the top of your head. You listen to the rattle of breath in her chest. Eileen touches the green crest on your robes with the tips of her fingers.

 

On the train back home, she hands you a thin book, a book from the second year booklist.

 

\--

 

The summer means you can wear thin dresses and walk through the fields without shoes without the muggles looking at you askance.

 

You finish your holiday homework in the first few weeks and then you are free to spend your days walking by the river and in the woods and through the fields as much as you want. You collect seeds for the window box you made, so that you can grow plants for potions.

 

Leigh spends hours with you; sometimes you two walk together, other times you lie down and read to each other or just talk. Sometimes he forces you to have dinner with his family, and his mother mutters about how skinny you are and makes you take a big box of her home baking with you when you leave. You sit in front of the television with Leigh and Leigh’s father and brother watching _Doctor Who_ or a game show Leigh’s father likes.

 

At the end of summer Leigh’s mother gives you a hug and a pretty, printed-cotton blouse she made for you. It smells like laundry powder, and it is the first new shirt you remember owning.

 

\--

 

“We got off on the wrong foot,” Avery says, the night they get off the train for the second time.

 

You look away from Avery’s sweet blue eyes and pointed face.

 

“I want us to be friends,” she spreads out her hands to include Mulciber and Lestrange. “Don’t you want us to be friends?”

 

“Well,” you say.

 

“I knew you’d see it this way,” Avery says.

 

“It’ll be good,” Mulciber says, and her voice is high and fragile.

 

In their classes together, Avery begins to sit next to you. Avery parrots the professors’ lectures to you in a slightly slow voice that is just a little mocking. You don’t bother to say how you can hear perfectly well, and that you could do the spell on your third try whereas she didn’t manage all class. She passes you notes that are full of insulting but not particularly witty comments about the Gryffindors or Hufflepuffs, and then you pass the notes onto Mulciber and Lestrange.

 

You begin to doodle aimlessly in your notebooks because Avery kept leaning over and glancing at your neat notes. You stare at Leigh’s red hair, three rows ahead of you. You begin to move your arm just a little erratically so that your spells fail.

 

Professor McGonagall notices one day, and keeps you after class. You’ve long respected Professor McGonagall, who is kind but firm, who revels in her skill and expects the best from her students.

 

“I must congratulate you on your exams last year,” she says, looking at you across her desk.

 

“Thank you,” you murmur, and reach out your hand to run across the grain of the wooden desk.

 

“But something has changed. I notice that your homework is sloppy. In class, it seems as though you’re not doing all that you are capable of.”

 

“Yes.” Your lips hardly move, and you feel something thick and heavy in your chest, tears threatening to spill out.

 

“I know you can do better.” She slides your last essay across the desk. You can see the grade—‘Acceptable’—she has given you. “You have good reason to take pride in your work, Miss Snape, whatever your friends might choose to do.”

 

You nod, and you are sure that Professor McGonagall can see how your eyes are welling up, and how wet your eyelashes are.

 

“You can come speak to me, at any time.” And she gestures towards the door, and you are mercifully dismissed.

 

\--

 

Leigh decides not to go home for Christmas, and you wish you could stay at Hogwarts forever. In the dormitories you hear each person brag in turn of what they expect to receive for Christmas. You fiddle with your socks fitfully, hoping to avoid their gaze. But no such luck.

 

“Snape, are you staying over Christmas?”

 

“Yes.”

 

There’s a brief flicker of something that flickers over Avery’s face, then her lips curl up in a smile. “I’ll be sure to send you something.”

 

Mulciber and Lestrange nod in agreement. “And don’t worry, you won’t need to get us anything in return.”

 

You spend two weeks exploring the nooks and crannies of the castle with Leigh. You will remember how his breath lingers in the cold air, his feet sunk in a foot of snow, and how his cheeks glow with warmth.

 

In the second week, you receive mince pies from Lestrange, a box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans from Mulciber, and a few blocks of different, flavoured chocolates from Avery. You cast a few spells over them but they do not seem to be unsafe. You brew a mild antidote before you try any of the food just in case. You share the rest with Leigh, who in turn gives you some of Mrs. Evans’s Christmas shortbread, which is as good as ever.

 

You find a small glen by the edge of the Forbidden Forest where you agree to meet with Leigh after the term resumes. He gives you handsome new quills and a sturdy inkwell, ever practical. You give him a small pendant made from a leaf of your favourite tree in Cokeworth, encased in resin. He beams at you; and you blush at his sheer joy.

 

You feel yourself regarding your housemates with a little more fondness when they return, though they are still in turn gushing, and complaining that the haul was not as good this year as in previous years.

 

\--

 

The last few months of the school year pass rather uneventfully. You make your excuses from Avery so you can study with Leigh in peace. Soon, you have all taken your exams and the days begin to warm. Hogwarts is beautiful in the flushes of spring. You spend days in the hidden glen with library books, trying new spells and making difficult brews that Slughorn never taught you.

 

Sometimes, you are with Leigh, other times, you are alone. But being alone doesn’t bother you too much. Each day falls away like petals of a soft flower. It is safe to smile.

 

 


End file.
